this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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I remain deeply skeptical that AI can solve the types of complex problems that require human thought. AIs will never be able to abstract away details correctly or design sensible workflows for boutique problems.
They can't, this is the same shit that happened when the dipshit ceos sent dev jobs over seas to code farms. Devs lost their jobs, and the code went to shit. Then when shit started breaking, they magically rehired everyone again to spend years cleaning up the shit code. LLMs are this all over again, just quicker this time.
The problems start if it can take on a lot of the junior work. If nobody can enter the industry, nobody can get the experience required to do the real engineering.
Open-source and personal work may be the only way to enter the programming field in the next decade.
Now is the worst time to try to enter the field. We need to see the AI bubble burst much more spectacularly, and only then might it be more reasonable. You certainly don't want to try to get into a field when you have a lot of other choices when that field is already flooded with all of these people who have been laid off, combined with the increased availability of programmers in other countries, knowing that at the moment many domestic programmers are not smart enough to form strong unions to protect their own jobs.
It was really hard in the mid 1980s to find a job as a new grad as all the Boomers who had been laid off during the recession were hired first as they had experience. It was McJobs or nothing unless you were a computer science/programming grad. Things have changed dramatically since then. It is a different world.
Not the current direction of AI, no. But the field is ever advancing. I won’t be shocked if we see AI capable of these things within my lifetime.
A lot of the things that current "AI" is doing exist since the 90s or even earlier. It is just that now the computational capacity is big enough to make much more complex looking inputs and results.
Claiming it will never be able to do something is silly. We have no idea what advances will come in the future.
I never said that.
The key point is that we are still limited by what LLMs can and can't do and fundamentally this is no new technology, just refined technology.
Think of it like cars. Cars exist since more than a hundred years. A modern car looks much fancier than a car a hundred years ago. But when it comes to the core aspect -moving passengers and cargo around on the ground- modern cars can't do more than cars from a hundred years ago. They are restricted by the same restriction (usually requiring some sort of road, requiring refueling points...)
We are pushing the boundaries of what LLMs can do, but there seems no indication, that it actually is a suitable tool for automated programming. LLMs are most likely just cars, where you need something that can fly.
No, but the person I had replied to, hence the context for my post, did:
I’m not saying LLMs can, or will be able to, do these things. LLMs are likely a dead-end on the road to AGI. Dead-ends are part of progress. The crossbow eventually hits a dead-end in terms of propelling projectiles with ease faster and harder, but that isn’t the end of projectiles. We got cannons, then hand cannons, and then guns.
I’m saying if LLMs are cars, AI is “vehicles.” LLM is a subset of the broader category. We have helicopters and planes. They came later than horse carts and cars, but they’re still vehicles. And used some of what we learned building carts and cars, but also with new ideas and concepts.
And for all we know, someday someone will figure out how to harness the power of gravity like we did with electromagnetism, and we’ll have flying cars. We can’t know, but just because we don’t have the technology now doesn’t mean we never will.